Education and being right

Throughout education the need to be right is drummed into one. The whole motivation is based on this need to be right. If you do something right then the teacher approves, praises you and puts a little tick against your work. These ticks for being right are the immediate rewards which act like grains of wheat used by Skinner to get pigeons to perform tasks as complicated as playing a miniature piano. Immediately after each correct action the pigeon was rewarded with a grain of wheat. In real life being effective produces its own reward. If you are an effective property developer you make money. If you are an effective lawyer you win your cases. But in school the natural rewards of effectiveness are absent. Instead there is the artificial ‘crystillised’ reward of the little tick that means you are right. But being right is not the same as being effective, for being right simply means doing things as they should be done according to some pre-set idea.

Alongside the reward for being right there is the awful shame attached to being wrong. Instead of the glorious tick there is the shameful cross. The cross means that you do not have teacher’s approval. The cross means that you have to try all over again which is a bore. The cross means that you are stupid. The cross means that other can feel superior to you. The well-educated terror of being wrong creates the fierce need to be right.